CHAPTER II. The Peasant Bodo

THE PEASANT BODO

A. Raw Material

1. The Roll of the Abbot Irminon, an estate book of the Abbey of St Germain des Prés, near Paris, written between 811 and 826. See Polyptyque de l'Abbaye de Saint-Germain des Prés, pub. Auguste Longnon, t. I, Introduction; t. II, Texte (Soc. de l'Hist. de Paris, 1886-95).

2. Charlemagne's capitulary, De Villis, instructions to his stewards on the management of his estates. See Guerard, Explication du Capitulaire 'de Villis' (Acad. des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Mémoires, t. XXI, 1857), pp. 165-309, containing the text, with a detailed commentary and a translation into French.

3. Early Lives of Charlemagne, ed. A.J. Grant (King's Classics, 1907). Contains the lives by Einhard and the Monk of St Gall, on which see Halphen, cited below.

4. Various pieces of information about social life may be gleaned from the decrees of Church Councils, Old High German and Anglo-Saxon charms and poems, and Aelfric's Colloquium, extracts from which are translated in Bell's Eng. Hist. Source Books, The Welding of the Race, 449-1066, ed. J.E.W. Wallis (1913). For a general sketch of the period see Lavisse Hist. de France, t. II, and for an elaborate critical study of certain aspects of Charlemagne's reign (including the Polyptychum) see Halphen, Études critiques sur l'Histoire de Charlemagne (1921); also A. Dopsch, Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit, Vornehmlich in Deutschland, 2 vols. (Weimar, 1912-13), which Halphen criticizes.

B. Notes to the Text

1. 'Habet Bodo colonus et uxor ejus colona, nomine Ermentrudis, homines sancti Germani, habent secum infantes III. Tenet mansum ingenuilem I, habentem de terre arabili bunuaria VIII et antsingas II, de vinea aripennos II, de prato aripennos VII. Solvit ad hostem de argento solidos II, de vino in pascione modios II; ad tertium annum sundolas C; de sepe perticas III. Arat ad hibernaticum perticas III, ad tramisem perticas II. In unaquaque ebdomada corvadas II, manuoperam I. Pullos III, ova XV; et caropera ibi injungitur. Et habet medietatem de farinarium, inde solvit de argento solidos II.' Op. cit., II, p. 78. 'Bodo a colonus and his wife Ermentrude a colona, tenants of Saint-Germain, have with them three children. He holds one free manse, containing eight bunuaria and two antsinga of arable land, two aripenni of vines and seven aripenni of meadow. He pays two silver shillings to the army and two hogsheads of wine for the right to pasture his pigs in the woods. Every third year he pays a hundred planks and three poles for fences. He ploughs at the winter sowing four perches and at the spring sowing two perches. Every week he owes two labour services (corvées) and one handwork. He pays three fowls and fifteen eggs, and carrying service when it is enjoined upon him. And he owns the half of a windmill, for which he pays two silver shillings.'

2. De Villis, c. 45.

3. Ibid. cc. 43, 49.

4. From 'The Casuistry of Roman Meals,' in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. D. Masson (1897), VII, p. 13.

5. Aelfric's Colloquium in op. cit. p. 95.

6. The Monk of St Gall's Life in Early Lives of Charlemagne, pp. 87-8.

7. Einhard's Life in op. cit., p. 45.

8. Anglo-Saxon charms translated in Stopford Brook, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (1899), p. 43.

9. Old High German charm written in a tenth-century hand in a ninth-century codex containing sermons of St Augustine, now in the Vatican Library. Brawne, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (fifth edition, Halle, 1902), p. 83.

10. Another Old High German charm preserved in a tenth-century codex now at Vienna. Brawne, op. cit., p. 164.

11. From the ninth-century Libellus de Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis, art. 100, quoted in Ozanam, La Civilisation Chrétienne chez les Francs (1849), p. 312. The injunction however, really refers to the recently conquered and still half-pagan Saxons.

12. Penitential of Haligart, Bishop of Cambrai, quoted ibid. p. 314.

13. Documents relatifs à l'Histoire de l'Industrie et du Commerce en France, ed. G. Faigniez, t. I, pp. 51-2.

14. See references in Chambers, The Medieval Stage (1913), I, pp. 161-3.

15. For the famous legend of the dancers of Kölbigk, see Gaston Paris, Les Danseurs Maudits, Légende Allemande du XIe Siècle (Paris 1900, reprinted from the Journal des Savants, Dec., 1899), which is a conte rendu of Schröder's study in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1899). The poem occurs in a version of English origin, in which one of the dancers, Thierry, is cured of a perpetual trembling in all his limbs by a miracle of St Edith at the nunnery of Wilton in 1065. See loc. cit., pp. 10, 14.

16. 'Swete Lamman dhin are,' in the original. The story is told by Giraldus Cambrensis in Gemma Ecclesiastica, pt. I, c. XLII. See Selections from Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. C.A.J. Skeel (S.P.C.K. Texts for Students, No. XI), p. 48.

17. Einhard's Life in op. cit. p. 45. See also ibid., p. 168 (note).

18. The Monk of St Gall's Life in op. cit., pp. 144-7.

19. Einhard's Life in op. cit., p. 39.

20. Ibid., p. 35.

21. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography (1897), I, p. 325.

22. The Monk of St Gall's Life in op. cit., pp. 78-9.

23. See the description in Lavisse, Hist. de France II, pt. I, p. 321; also G. Monod, Les moeurs judiciaires au VIIIe Siècle, Revue Historique, t. XXXV (1887).

24. See Faigniez, op. cit., pp. 43-4.

25. See the Monk of St Gall's account of the finery of the Frankish nobles: 'It was a holiday and they had just come from Pavia, whither the Venetians had carried all the wealth of the East from their territories beyond the sea,--others, I say, strutted in robes made of pheasant-skins and silk; or of the necks, backs and tails of peacocks in their first plumage. Some were decorated with purple and lemon-coloured ribbons; some were wrapped round with blankets and some in ermine robes.' Op. cit., p. 149. The translation is a little loose: the 'phoenix robes' of the original were more probably made out of the plumage, not of the pheasant but of the scarlet flamingo, as Hodgson thinks (Early Hist. of Venice, p. 155), or possibly silks woven or embroidered with figures of birds, as Heyd thinks (Hist. du Commerce du Levant, I, p. 111).

26. The Monk of St. Gall's Life in op. cit., pp. 81-2.

27. This little poem was scribbled by an Irish scribe in the margin of a copy of Priscian in the monastery of St Gall, in Switzerland, the same from which Charlemagne's highly imaginative biographer came. The original will be found in Stokes and Strachan, Thesaurus Palæohibernicus (1903) II, p. 290. It has often been translated and I quote the translation by Kuno Meyer, Ancient Irish Poetry (2nd ed., 1913), p. 99. The quotation from the Triads of Ireland at the head of this chapter is taken from Kuno Meyer also, ibid. pp. 102-3.